"On behalf of ICANN we are grateful to the Latin script community for volunteering to develop the Latin script LGR proposal for the root zone," said Sarmad Hussain from the IDN Program at ICANN.

With composition and work plan approved, the Latin script Generation Panel will start its work on the label generation rules. According to the LGR Procedure [PDF, 772 KB], the starting point of any Generation Panel's work is the Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR), with its second version (MSR-2) released on 27 April 2015. The full specification of Generation Panel's tasks can be found in the LGR Procedure [PDF, 772 KB] in particular, Section B.3 "Variant Rule Generation Procedure".

"I'd like to take this opportunity to reiterate our appreciation for the efforts of many communities towards developing their root zone LGR proposals," said Sarmad Hussain. "We still have more work to do including organizing script panels for Hebrew, Myanmar, Sinhala and Tibetan. I encourage interested parties to lend their skills in support of this effort.

There are currently LGR efforts underway by Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Latin and Neo-Brahmi communities. In addition, the Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Khmer, Lao and Thai script communities have finalized their root zone LGR proposals, of which the Arabic script proposal has been integrated in the first edition of the Root Zone LGR.

For further information on the IDN Program at ICANN, please visit www.icann.org/idn. To start a new Generation Panel or to get involved in an existing one, please email at IDNProgram@icann.org.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: www.icann.org

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."